Arguing over Texts presents a rhetorical method for analyzing how people disagree over the meaning of texts and how they attempt to reconcile those disagreements through argument. The book recovers and adapts a classification of recurring types of disagreement over textual meaning, invented by ancient Greek and Roman teachers of rhetoric: the interpretive stases. Drawing on the rhetorical works of Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, and Hermogenes, the book devotes a chapter to each of the six interpretive stases, which classify issues concerning ambiguous words and phrases, definitions of terms, clashes between the text’s letter and its spirit, internal contradictions, applications of the text to novel cases, and the authority of the interpreter or the text itself. From the dispute over Phillis Wheatley’s allegedly self-racist poetry to the controversy over whether some of Abraham Lincoln’s letters provide evidence he was gay, the book offers examples from religion, politics, history, literary criticism, and law to illustrate that the interpretive stases can be employed to analyze debates over texts in virtually any sphere. In addition to its classical rhetorical foundation, the book draws on research from modern rhetorical theory and language science to elucidate the rhetorical, linguistic, and cognitive grounds for the argumentative construction of textual meaning. The method presented in this book thus advances scholars’ ability to examine the rhetorical dynamics of textual interpretation, to trace the evolution of textual meaning, and to explore how communities ground their beliefs and behaviors in texts.
Contribution to Semantic Analysis of Arabic Language